Photographer Anu Kumar on reconnecting with her Indian heritage, failing exams and recipes for weddings

At It’s Nice That, we always love to hear about talented photographers using their medium to draw people together, particularly when a project has personal significance for the photographer. Melbourne-based photographer Anu Kumar has done just that. Over the past seven years and through two photo series, she has been taking visits back to the town of Kahvi Nagar, where she was born, to reconnect with her Indian heritage. But, she explains, it wasn’t really the act of taking the photographs which helped her to forge new bonds, so much as putting in the time to hang out with her family and explore the village as she went about documenting them. “I occasionally show them [her family] some work but they’re not that interested, which is fine (I actually prefer it that way),” she tells us. “They’re just happy that I come to India and spend time with them.”

Though she was born in India, she moved to Australia at just 8 months old. At university, Anu started following a career in occupational therapy, but after failing her exams she realised that she was in need of some new ideas – “It just wasn’t for me, and it was obvious by how badly I failed.” Taking a break from her studies, she went travelling around India and Nepal and began snapping photos of her travels. At first just for fun, she began taking it more seriously when she went to study Photography at RMIT. “It was a long process and I feel it took close to 5 years to develop a photographic language that I feel proud of,” she tells us. “It takes a bit of trial and error in the beginning. I started to mimic the styles of photographers that inspired me, and that's what studying photography was good for – you kind of need to work through it, experiment, and get it out of your system before you can figure out your own style.”

So, having developed the necessary skills and increasingly honing her visual language, Anu set out to begin her series Nagar, which means “town”. Taking daily ambles with her two aunties, she re-discovered the town she was born in, taking photos as she went. “They would run errands, and I would have my waist finder camera slug around my shoulder”, she recalls. Anu loved the unpredictability of these walks, never knowing what she would come across. “There were many walks when I wouldn’t take a single picture and others where I'd take multiple rolls.”

Anu’s photographic explorations of her heritage took on a new perspective after her Nana Ji (grandfather) passed away in 2018. In all the four years she had been documenting Nagar, she’d accumulated an “endless archive of strangers from the street” but not a single photograph of her Nana Ji. “That's when I started documenting my home life in Kavi Nagar, and the two projects intertwined in a way, inside and outside the home.”

And so a new series entitled Ghar (home), began to take shape. This series is composed of intimate moments spent with her family. Rarely showing the faces of the family member, she instead focuses on little details which encapsulate the feeling of home: the carefully arranged folds of a family member’s clothes, the soles of someone’s feet as they take a nap, or the hands of an aunt preparing a meal. One of her favourite images in the series shows the cooking utensils used by the Halwai at her cousin’s wedding back in 2019. "Halwai" are sweet makers who come to weddings and cook, Anu explains. “We provided all the ingredients, and they cooked. In this case they made hundreds of Laddus.” Again, in this photograph, the human presence is insinuated thoughtfully through symbolic objects rather than depicted directly.

“I’m sitting with my aunt now”, says Anu. Eager to share her memory from the wedding day, her aunt recites the shopping list she made. Next time you need to make a jumbo batch of deliciously sweet Laddus, Anu’s aunt has got you sorted. You’ll need:

20kg Basin (gram flour)

1kg watermelon seeds

30kg Sugar

30L Refined cooking oil

Green cardamom (“she forgets the quantity”)

Anu is currently visiting her family in India: “I feel now that I’m here I can close the chapter on this project, and start something new”. As she works on cooking up new ideas for her next project, she is pleased to say that Nagar and Ghar will be published together as a book later this year with Perimeter Editions.